stuff by nick o'leary

Nope. That didn’t really work out did it. Let’s not kid ourselves, I’m not about to recap the last 20 weeks. For all sorts of reasons, it’s taken all my energy to keep the various plates spinning with little room for much else.

A lot of my time has been spent heads down trying to make progress on the Node-RED roadmap we published in the summer. The content of the roadmap is good, but the timescales I set out for it were not. I knew they were ambitious and set myself and the community a challenge – but ultimately the weight of delivering the roadmap has fallen on my shoulders. And I’ve been feeling that weight heavily for a while.

One of my goals for last year was to improve the sustainability of the project; to get to the point where I could go do something else and the project would continue to progress. The last few months have shown that, despite some positive signs, it’s not there yet. There are times when I feel frustrated at having to churn out code as it leaves very little time for doing all the other things I could/should be doing. But I also recognise that getting the roadmap done will unlock so much potential in the project.

And this is one of my problems; having invested so much time, energy and emotion in the project over the last five years, when I talk to others about my goals and aspirations, I usually end up talking about them in relation to the project. I think I’m okay with that in the short term, but I need to remind myself that I’m not the project and the project isn’t me. I need to remember its okay to be selfish and that I’m allowed to have goals that don’t relate to Node-RED.

So here we are with 2018.

With all that said, my focus remains getting Node-RED to be a sustainable project and getting the roadmap delivered. Beyond that… time will tell.